So I gathered a few results… after some annoying results I found a bottleneck in my system on 1 of the drives that seemed to bring the benchmark result down greatly, however once this was worked out I acheived the following: … →

I’ve recently setup a ZFS raidz with 7 disks using NexentaStor, natively this doesn’t come with AFP, but I managed to get a package and get this all working (which i’ll demo in an upcoming tutorial), one thing i noticed however is that I could never find any benchmarks that tested the general use of a NAS… i.e. using CIFS or AFP over a network to another machine and testing performance. There are literally 0 AFP benchmarks for NexentaStor due to its non-native support. So here it is

Well, i’ve used FreeNAS for around 2 years+ now, and all has been good, however, in that time demand for large quantities of storage has now been joined by demand for high speed storage; Once I had replaced all of my drives with 2tb 7200rpm drives I realised that FreeNAS wasn’t giving me the performance on each drive that i’d like.

Welcome NexentaStor… a storage appliance natively supporting ZFS as its based on OpenSolaris! NexentaStor offers many of the same features of FreeNAS, however at a greater level of performance. This comes at a cost though, the free Community edition is limited to a some what large 18tb, whereas the paid version will cost you.

Also NexentaStor is a pure storage appliance, although it supports CIFS/iSCSI/NFS and the likes, it does not have all the bells and whistles of FreeNAS… but for me, there is no use having all these features if I can’t have the speed.

I’m installing NexentaStor now as we speak, after which I’ll be posting a review / tutorial on NexentaStor after i’ve got it up and running and configured to my liking 🙂 I hope you enjoy it!